Performance Details. It can be played on a stage, in a school hall or large room. It can last from twenty to forty minutes, with questions afterwards.
The film Shakespeare in Love introduced Elizabethan London and the Globe theatre to many cinemagoers for the first time. Now you can go on a personal tour and your guide -- John Shakespeare himself. He'll describe the London playhouses that were used by the actors, take you back to their first "gigs" in Inn Yards and their command performances -- in the wood panelled halls of the aristocracy, and before the Queen herself in the great banqueting hall of Whitechapel palace.
Playhouses were popular. Elizabethan London became the theatre capital of Europe - the Rose, the Swan, the Theatre, the Curtain, the Fortune, the Blackfriars, and Shakespeare's own Globe playhouse.
Shakespeare himself, as a young boy of four, may have sat between his father's legs as he saw his first play in Stratford upon Avon: the players would have had to obtain a licence from the Mayor of the town, and offer him a free performance in the Guildhall. And the mayor who first permitted a troupe to play in the market town? None other than John Shakespeare himself!
Hear the poetry of Shakespeare as he conjures up a variety of scenes to rival any film set or location - a castle, a forest, a ship foundering in the waves, and above all the atmosphere, the "feel" of a place.
Hear the Puritan preachers fulminating against the ungodly goings on in the common playhouses - "If you will learn how to play the harlots, or become a bawd and devirginate maids ; if you will learn how to murder, how to poison, to play the whoremaster, to sing filthy songs of love, to speak..filthy….you may go to no other school..but the glittering theatre houses."
If you want to bring Shakespeare's theatre off the page for audiences, or students, this is the performance for you.
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